'Mad' about the good ol' days

GOOD SPORTS

February 22, 2006|By Jay Hart Of The Morning Call

The other day, I met the first person to ever wear a seat belt. His name is "Mad' Marion McDonald and he's 87 years old.

Back in the day -- meaning the 1930s and '40s -- Mad Marion, so named because he liked to eat hamburgers while he raced, competed on the 26 miles of hard-packed sand of Daytona Beach, which balloons up to 500 feet wide at low tide. At the time, there were only about 150 miles of paved road in the entire United States, making hard-packed beaches the best place to race, and Daytona's beach was the best of those.

Anyway, tying yourself into a 1930s convertible was about the last thing you wanted to do because if you crashed, the safest place to be was outside of the car, which is why no one wore seatbelts.

But the harder and harder Mad Marion raced, the more and more his body made like a super ball bouncing around the car. It was all he could do just to hang onto the steering wheel, let alone maneuver it in a way to win a race.

So in 1939 he decided to do something about that. He took a piece of rope, threaded it under his seat, got in his car and tied himself down. But while Mad Marion might have been mad, he wasn't stupid. For he knew that if he tipped over there would be no way for anyone to pry him out of the car, hence the pocketknife on his steering wheel. That way he could cut himself out if he ever ran into any trouble.

"I never had any trouble," Mad Marion told me. "It was fun in those days."

Isn't that always the case?

When I got to high school, all anyone ever talked about was how much fun things used to be. They'd talk about how the rules were more relaxed, the classes were easier and the girls were hotter. Same thing in college, especially after they banned tailgating at the football games.

But I tend to believe Mad Marion. He's one of those guys with calloused hands and Velcro shoes, which tells me he's lived it. Heck, he still drives around a '65 Ford rebuilt to look like the one a guy named Fireball Roberts raced before he got killed.

Says it runs better than his brand new Buick.

Before we parted, I had to clarify something.

"If you're upside down, how were you going to get the knife open to cut yourself free?" I asked.